A flamboyant American lawyer likened to Breaking Bad’s unscrupulous Saul Goodman has gone on the run weeks before he was due to be sentenced for stealing $600 million from the government.
Eric Conn advertised himself as “Mr Social Security” on hoardings across Kentucky, paid $500,000 to put a one-tonne replica of the Lincoln Memorial outside his office and hired scantily clad models known as “Conn Hotties” to promote his law firm, before it erupted into a scandal over which he faces being jailed for up to 12 years.
“It was totally predictable that he would flee,” said Ned Pillersdorf, a lawyer representing Conn’s victims, who had fought to keep him in jail before sentencing.
Conn, 56, pleaded guilty in March to stealing from the Social Security Administration by submitting falsified disability claims on behalf of clients. He also admitted having bribed a judge with $10,000 a month for six years to rubber-stamp 1,700 claims and turn a blind eye to the fake medical evidence they contained.
He had told staff that he had money stashed overseas and planned to flee to Cuba or Ecuador if the law ever caught up with him. After his arrest last year, however, he was released on $1.25 million bail by a judge in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, who dismissed that evidence as “hearsay”.
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Mr Pillersdorf said: “There has been a betting pool going on in Prestonsburg, not on if he would flee, but when.”
Conn founded his law firm in 1993, hitching five mobile homes together, placing a 19ft inflatable Statue of Liberty on the roof and erecting a giant fluorescent hoarding outside with a model of himself sitting on the top waving to passers-by. He paid to have his photograph on the front and back cover of every local telephone book, hired a former Miss Kentucky beauty queen to act as his public relations director and made a music video, backed by hip-thrusting dancing girls in tight shorts, in an attempt to persuade President Obama to appoint him to the federal Social Security Board.
When he broke up with his porn star girlfriend, he got her to shoot a marketing advert with him, in which she was shown yelling at him: “I don’t need your money, honey. Matter of fact, you can take your Mercedes, your beach house, your Armani suits, and shove ’em up your ass.”
This week the trial of Alfred Adkins, a psychologist, was told that he was paid about $200,000 for signing forms describing the mental impairments of Conn’s clients.
Elizabeth Wright, assistant US attorney, said that Mr Adkins signed forms about children that listed conditions such as work- related stress. In one case, she claimed, Mr Adkins said that a boy aged three would be able to manage his money if he was awarded disability benefits. He signed more than 200 medical incapacity forms for Conn clients from 2007 to 2011, the court heard.
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Conn, who could have been called as a witness had he not disappeared, burnt 2.5 million pages of documents and smashed computers at his office after learning that he was under investigation, the court was told, but Mr Adkins did not destroy any evidence.